In today’s newspaper I scalded the Lifetime movie version of Kim Edwards’ novel “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” which is set largely in Lexington.
The book is great stuff.
The movie is something you can easily pass over in favor of whatever’s on VH-1 at the moment: From “Rock of Love” to “My Fair Brady,” it’s surely more tightly scripted than the Lifetime-ization of Edwards’ book, which manages to waste the considerable talents of Gretchen Mol and Emily Watson.
And if you’re looking for some Lexington in this movie largely set in Lexington, don’t bother. It appears to have been filmed in a California driveway.
But the question is, what other books have simply ruined your day when you saw how they have been shredded into celluloid?
The cinematic record is mixed for some authors — John Irving has been particularly oddly served, from “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules” on the up side to the “A Prayer for Owen Meany” sort-of adaptation on the let-us-never-speak-of-it-again side. All you can say is: Read the book. Forget the movie.
But even though Lifetime laid out some bucks to publicize its adaptation of “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” including a ginormous ad in the New York Times book review, this won’t be the movie that breaks Lifetime’s reputation as the purveyor of all that is cinematically tacky, choppy, poorly scripted and wasting of actor talent. It’s true that some Lifetime movies are watchable, that some fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category: This isn’t one of them.
